Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

We made love three times that night. After the first time we did not roll away. I didn’t make my escape. He held me, and I stroked his sparsely haired thigh. I could smell his sweat, which was sharp but not unpleasant. We embraced in silence for ten minutes or longer. Then he said, “Are you ready again?”

By the time I got dressed his apartment had lost some of its strangeness. It was not in any way an auspicious or even particularly comfortable home—a viewless room in a white brick building that must have been built, hurriedly, in the early sixties. It contained a platform bed covered with quilts, a stereo and television, and an absurdly large black sofa which, at sunrise, would begin its daily function of sucking up whatever light filtered in through the single window. On the wall was a silver-framed poster depicting a Matisse painting of a gaudy, lavishly draped room empty of life except for three dagger-shaped goldfish suspended in a bright blue bowl. Erich’s apartment could have been a doctor’s waiting room. It conveyed little about its inhabitant beyond a certain thin sorrow. Still, by the time I’d dressed, and had written down his phone number and left my own on a slip of paper, the apartment had taken on weight. It did not appear to be any less bleak than it had when we first arrived; it had merely begun to reveal itself as a place in which someone did, in fact, live. A red light blinked on the answering machine, signifying unheard messages. I blew Erich a kiss from the door, whispered, “See you later,” and walked three flights down to the street.

This was usually my favorite moment, after the sex was finished and I was restored to myself, still young and viable, free to go everywhere. Tonight, though, I felt irritated and weightless; I couldn’t quite pick up my sense of myself. Twenty-fourth Street lay quietly in its bath of dark yellow light. A lone hooker strolled in black stockings and a fur jacket, and an all-night produce stand offered displays of oranges, waxy apples, and carnations dyed green for St. Patrick’s Day. I was infused with a bodily pleasure that was intricately, brittlely edged in regret. Something had been lost, at least for the moment—some measure of possibility. I walked twenty blocks home, but couldn’t shake the feeling. It followed me like a thief.

I didn’t get home until after four. Clare was asleep. When I saw her the following evening, I didn’t offer to tell her much about Erich. Clare and I based our conversations about men on a shared attitude of ironic disdain, and I wasn’t sure how to present a man like Erich. I was not in love, but for once an evening’s sex had been something other than clownish comedy, desperation, or boredom.

Clare said, “You’re being very quiet about this, Jonathan. What exactly is up?”

“Nothing’s up.” We were sipping Pernod on the sofa. Pernod was our latest drink. We had a habit of brief but devout loyalties to different exotic liquors.

“You’re being circumspect,” she said, “and you’re not the type. Does this guy seem like he could turn out to be someone special? What exactly are you hiding?”

“‘This guy’ is another would-be actor slinging drinks in hell. He happens to be a great fuck.”

“Honey, don’t toss something like that off lightly,” she said. “I met my last great fuck in, what, 1979? Let’s have a few details, please. Come on, give. This is your Aunt Clare.”

She took a deep swallow of her drink, and I thought I saw under her friendly avidity the plain fear that I would leave her; that I’d disappear into love. It showed in her eyes and along her mouth, which could go stern and disapproving despite her lavish crimson lipstick.

“Honey, there are places even the best of friends can’t travel together,” I said.

“Oh, that’s not true,” she said. “You don’t mean that, you’re just embarrassed by the subject. Right?”

Clare and I kept no secrets—that was the heady, reckless aspect of our friendship. Perhaps it was our substitute for the creaturely knowledge other couples glean from sex. Clare and I confessed everything. We stripped ourselves naked and numbered our faults. We knew one another’s most disreputable fantasies; we confessed our deceits and greeds, our self-flattering lies. We described all our sexual entanglements, and we knew the condition of one another’s bowels.

And now, for the first time, I wanted to hold something apart. I wasn’t sure why. It may have been that very uncertainty I hoped to preserve. Erich had surprised me with his gentle competence. Something about him touched me—his edgy good cheer and slender prospects. Something about him made me angry. I didn’t know what I felt and I disliked being asked to give my feelings a name. I may have feared that in describing them so early I’d sap them of their potential for growth or change. I may have been right.

But I chose that night not to cultivate secrets. I, too, feared solitude and abandonment, and I knew I would never make a life with Erich. He would, at best, have been a first step toward something uncertain that lay beyond the circle of domestic warmth I shared with Clare. She was my main love in the world. I had no other attachment half so profound.

So I told her everything. There wasn’t, as it turned out, very much to tell. When I had finished, Clare said, “Honey, you’ve just found yourself a Doctor Feelgood.” She sang a couple of lines from Aretha’s song. “‘Don’t call me no doctor, filling me up with all of them pills, I got me a man named Dr. Feelgood, makes me feel real gooo-oood.’”

That seemed a sufficient accounting, at least for the time being. Erich would be Doctor Feelgood. From that night on, the longer I called him by that name, the more perfectly it came to fit. Clare and I continued our sisterly relations with our loyalties undiluted. I had found myself a nice little thing on the side. Clare counseled me to ride it until it thinned out, as such flings inevitably did. That seemed like sound advice.

And so Erich and I started dating. Since he worked nights, we usually met after eleven. We’d have a drink or two in a bar, and go to his place.

I did not learn many particulars of his life. He had a singular ambition, an ill-defined but persistent one: to be recognized. The means by which he’d achieve recognition were uncertain—he was simply looking for a break, trying to position himself for discovery. He’d audition for anything. He tried out for Broadway musicals though he couldn’t sing. He’d work fourteen-hour days as an extra in any movie being shot in New York, and at Christmastime willingly played a life-sized mechanical soldier at F. A.O. Schwarz. He took endless acting classes, spoke convincingly of his ambition to become a better actor, but as I knew him longer, I began to realize that acting wasn’t really the point. Acclaim was the point, and his gig at the toy store provided roughly the same mix of satisfaction and anguish he’d have derived from playing the lead in a Broadway show. He enjoyed methodical pursuit and he worshipped attention; he did not dream of accomplishment per se. In his ordinary life he was all but invisible—he wore jeans and polo shirts, stammered his way through the simplest conversations, lived alone in a barren apartment. But at Schwarz during the Christmas season he never fell out of character, never ceased his stiff-limbed robotic movements during the whole of an eight-hour shift. In gym shorts on a 30° day he jogged forty-five times down the same block of Bleecker Street for the sake of being a shadowy, background figure in a movie that would never be released. At night, with the lights off, he was great in bed.

Although I saw him once or twice a week, I didn’t get to know him. I suspect he worried that if I—if anyone—came to know him too well, the motion of his life would somehow wind down—his obscure destiny would be confirmed. I myself worried that he lived on the brink of total surrender to another person’s will. I thought that when he finally, fully despaired of achieving fame he would make himself into a fan, find a lover and cheerfully relinquish every vestige of his will. Maybe I’d sensed it the first moment I saw him, nodding eagerly at an old man’s barroom conversation. He was practicing his powers of attention. I didn’t want them focused too ardently on me.